Medical students express respects to 'silent teachers' for Qingming Festival
Whereas most Chinese paid tribute to their ancestors and deceased family or friends on Thursday, for Qingming Festival, students from the Shanghai Medical College Fudan University expressed their honor and respect for body donors, the silent teachers in their medical study.
"There is no medicine without anatomy. There is no anatomy without body donors," said Dr Li Wensheng, head of the college's anatomy department.
"Though much modern medical software and pictures are good supplements to teaching books, donated bodies are still students' best teachers."
All bodies receive professional processing before they are used for teaching and research. After the bodies are no longer useful in the the college, most are cremated and buried at the Shanghai Fu Shou Yuan Cemetery, apart from a small number that are taken back by their relatives for burial. There is a monument for body donors in the cemetery, with the names of all donors listed.
At the body museum of the college, exhibits of body donation documents and letters express love and devotionto the donors.
Donation letters and documents displayed at the college's body museum.
The department has statues for its staff and relatives who donated bodies to pay respect at the museum entrance.
The college has educated its students to show their deepest respect and gratitude before the first anatomy class. Every student and teacher must stand up and bow to the bodies and present flowers before beginning the course.
Students show their respect before starting their first anatomy class.
Since 2016, all students including overseas students participating in anatomy courses started to write a letter to body donors before completing the course. The college has since edited many of those letters into dozens of books to record the respects of thousands of medical students.
Medical students write letters to body donors before completing their anatomy courses. The letter on the left is from an overseas student.
